


Making the Man

by Todesengel



Series: Mag7 Bingo [17]
Category: Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Magnificent Seven AU: ATF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-14
Updated: 2012-04-14
Packaged: 2017-11-03 16:23:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/383486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Todesengel/pseuds/Todesengel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ezra has always believed that naked people have little to no influence on society.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making the Man

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: naked. 
> 
> Title of fic (and summary) comes from the following quote by Mark Twain: "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little to no influence on society."

**1.** Ezra Standish has thirteen passports, none of which bear his current name. 

(He's relatively certain it's his actual birth name; he has a copy of a birth certificate with that name on it. Of course, he also has copies of birth certificates bearing the names of Malcolm Bier, Edward Stevens, Enzo Castelnuovo, and Ezra Shipley, all of unimpeachable legitimacy, so he's learned not to put too much trust in official documents. Still, he's been going by Ezra Standish now for close on fifteen years and he's at least come to think of it as his own name, despite the possibility that it technically isn't.)

He keeps the passports as a reminder of the life he almost led, before a fit of post-adolescent rebellion compelled him to forge some truly impressive credentials and background documents (and a helpful hacker got him a nice degree from Harvard in Criminal Science) and he joined the FBI. It was simultaneously the best and worst decision of his life, and while he sometimes regrets aspects of his chosen career, most of the time he's…content. 

He still keeps the passports, though. 

And all the associated documentation. 

At this point, they're almost like old friends, having moved with him from Tuscany (where he gave up the con's life for good; it's a story that makes him look incredibly bad and involves the destruction of a custom made Armani suit and as such Maude takes every possible opportunity to relate it to unanimous hilarity) to Virginia to Georgia and now here. To Denver, Colorado which, after the places he's been and the people he's lived with and the stunts he's pulled for the FBI, is more of a backwater town than he'd ever imagined he'd end up in – let alone one he'd put down roots in. Everything's so…boxy. So spread out. Clearly a city designed to accommodate wide coaches and motor vehicles, and while Ezra appreciates two-way roads that can be driven down without fear of head on collisions, he still finds everything…dry. Dry and rocky and still and full of people who still think plaid flannel shirts are fashionable. 

The day he moves in – which makes it two weeks since he was official transferred to Chris Larabee's insane ATF team – he hides the passports around his apartment, in part to avoid temptation, in part to invite temptation in. It's nice knowing that they're there, that he has the option of catching a plane to somewhere else, of being someone else, of tapping into one of the stashes Maude doesn't think he knows about and living the life he abandoned. (When he has to drive along his first mountain pass in what Vin laconically calls "just a little flurry" but which Ezra knows in his heart is a Blizzard of Epic Proportions, he's extremely tempted to break out Gautier Archambault, who is a successful French ex-pat who sails about the world on his personal yacht and spends an inordinate amount of time lounging about the beaches of St. Barts.) 

He won't ever do it, of course. Conning for the government is so much more appealing than conning on his own dime, even with expense reports. And it's nice to always be able to count on a team to back his play; well, most of the time, and his therapist told him he had to work through his issues on trust before he could truly put the entire horrible debacle of Atlanta behind him. (He'd politely refrained from laughing in her face. This, he considered, was real progress.) Still, it's a nice thing to have around, all these lives he could be living (mostly European, one supposedly rich oil man from Texas, and one completely nice, completely ordinary shoe salesman who claims to be from Kansas City) but he knows that it would look…bad to his new team mates to have them clearly out and about his place, instead of discretely tucked away, like all of his secrets. Not that he intends on inviting any of them over any time soon; they're all clearly insane, and if this hadn't been the last chance to save his failing career in Federal law enforcement he never would have signed up for this gig, but even so. Having them out on display (besides just being incredibly stupid) is also an admission of defeat, an admission that the smirk behind Chris's eyes – that Ezra would only last six months before he failed out of whatever insane program Chris Larabee ran – was right on the money, and even though Ezra barely knows the man, he knows he'll die before he lets that happen. 

So hidden away – in false books, behind awkward to reach places, in secret crannies under the sink and, in the case of Sir Edmund Featherstonhaugh, Bart, (he's extremely proud of that one, for it has absolutely impeccable credentials) slipped into the neat little pocket he made in the leather cover of his 1922 copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. 

The first time Vin barges into his house completely unannounced (which is not an entirely true statement – Vin announced himself quite loudly and insistently until Ezra caved and let him in before the neighbors really started complaining) he manages to find every single one of them in less than ten minutes. 

(It pisses Ezra off until the day he arrives home and finds them all neatly arranged like a strange house of cards with a brand new one bearing his actual name holding pride of place on the top.)

 

 **2.** Ezra likes his clothes. He has a walk in closet (ok, technically it was a spare bedroom, but when is he ever going to have guests?) and he spends a great deal of time in there, controlling humidity, temperature, organization. He treats his clothes with reverence, for they've saved him a hundred – no, a thousand – times when the con went almost bad. And he has what he likes to call his "costumes" – the rough polyester suits, the working stiff's off-brand shoddy jeans, the boots whose only claim to any sort of redemption is the fact that they're triple-enforced steel toed (also, one pair has a knife hidden in the toe of each boot, but he's unfortunately forgotten which pair that is; it makes running a con slightly more interesting in many ways). He has Armani and Gucci, Dolce  & Gabanna and Hugo Boss, and any number of suits that bear no label at all, but fit him in all the right ways – hand-tailored suits of wool and linen, with silk linings and matching waistcoats. He has dress shoes imported from Italy, always buffed to a brilliant shine, and silk ties, and platinum tie bars and cufflinks made out of ivory and jade. 

So many, many pretty things, and he almost never gets to wear them. 

For one, the weather here is inhospitable to fine dress – if it's not the dirty snow staining his pants legs, then it's the dust and grime turning his beautiful white shirts an unappealing gray. And if it's not either of those things, then it's Chris's goddamn ranch, which is nine parts mud and one part horse shit. And while this normally wouldn't be that much of a problem – even with the rutted unpaved track (he won't dignify the thing by calling it a road) leading from the barely paved County Road 6 (and he literally has no words for his horror at the fact that his superior lives off of a road that doesn't even have a proper name) – Ezra can usually avoid stepping in the majority of the mud and…other things on his way to the door when he's required to make an appearance at the ranch. He can even avoid the snuffling slobber of Chris's far too friendly horses. 

What he can't avoid, however, are his teammates, who apparently have a perpetual game of touch football going on (they _call_ it touch football, but given how often they tackle each other, Ezra's just going to chalk the name up to a compromise to keep Nathan from getting grumpy). Well, he _could_ avoid them – he's great at avoiding things, especially unpleasant things – but the problem is that there doesn't seem to be a schedule. Or a roster. Or, actually, any sort of rules. Which means some days he shows up and manages to make it from his car all the way into Chris's home with nothing worse than muddy shoes, whereas on other days he shows up, makes it two feet from his car, and then is slammed into the ground by Buck (or JD, or Nathan, or Vin, but never Chris who is, apparently, either above this foolish game or will kill anybody who tries to tackle him; Ezra still isn't sure which statement is the truth) and then piled on by the others, and there goes another couple hundred to his dry cleaner to get the crap off of his suit. 

(He tried sending the bill to Chris once. It came back to him folded into a rather evocative hand gesture; even while he was pissed, he still couldn't help but admire the man's creativity.)

After six weeks of random tackles and exorbitant cleaning bills, Ezra finally caves and buys a pair of Levis, a pair of working boots, and a six-pack of cheap cotton shirts. 

He feels both incredibly comfortable and inexplicably guilty the first time he puts everything on. 

 

 **3.** Ezra learned all his banking skills from his mother, and that pretty much says everything right off the bat. 

He squirrels it away, in shell companies, in trusts, in stocks, in jewelry and fine art, in (and he'll never cop to this out loud) the lining of the mattress on his bed. He puts it in banks too, of course, but he was born on the other side of the law and he knows that banks aren't the safe havens people think they are – even in this day and age of mistrust – and he wants to have an accessible cache for the inevitable day that something from his past (on either side of the law) comes back to bite him in his ass.

He thinks he's pretty good at hiding his total assets, too; at least, the IRS hasn't ever dinged him for tax evasion (he, of course, fills out his forms scrupulously, paying the government _exactly_ what Ezra Standish owes; it's just too bad for Uncle Sam that the bulk of his wealth is owned by most of his aliases). True, he's no hacker, but he knows how to keep things at arms length, and how to hide funds in offshore accounts and how to always have a certain little something stashed away in a non-extradition country. It's all habit now, of course, because he knows he loves this life of _solving_ crime instead of committing it. It's easier to enjoy the finer things in life when you don't have to fear that those fine things will result in incarceration. 

But even though it's habit, he still makes sure none of it can be traced back to him. Nothing he's done is _technically_ illegal, as far as he's aware – at least, no more illegal than defrauding the Federal government is illegal, and even though he's a Federal employee he's also his mother's son and, quite frankly, he thinks the Federal government could use a little defrauding now and again – but Atlanta has made him extremely wary about there being even the slightest whiff of corruption about his person, and he knows that to anybody else this method of banking would seem to just reek of corruption. 

(He does feel guilty about this at times, especially during the election cycles when he has to create a self-imposed ban on the number of newspapers and news channels he's allowed to look at since otherwise he gets worked up into a righteous rage, so at least one of his aliases is set up to funnel quite a bit of money into various and assorted charities. It's not that he doesn't appreciate the role of the Federal government, or its legion of employees, or even most of the programs the money is spent on. He just objects to his hard earned money being used to pay for a bridge to nowhere. Also, he likes the vaguely Robin Hood aspect of it all.)

So when JD approaches him over lunch one day, twisting a folder in his hands, Ezra's first thought isn't that his overseas assets have been found but that JD's finally heard about Atlanta. He's definitely not expecting JD to sit down and say in a rush, "Ezra, I was just poking around Nick Falco's financials and I found this account that I think might be yours and it's not really involved but some of the money is invested in one of his shell companies and I don't know if you know or not but I thought I should tell you before I told Chris just in case, you know, you didn't know this was happening." 

Ezra doesn't blink because he's still feeling his way around these men (well, technically they're men; most of the time he thinks they're all just overgrown boys. Hell, JD isn't overgrown yet, he's just a boy) and he's still not sure where he stands with them; hell, he still isn't even sure if Chris will keep him on after his six month probation period ends. 

He's still not sure that he's going to stay. 

"How do you know that the account is mine?" he says, as calmly as possible, and JD gives him such a look of utter cynicism that Ezra has to take a sip of his coffee to hide his surprise. 

"I'm a twenty-four year old white male with a working class background and a degree in Comp. Sci. from MIT who isn't drowning in student loan debt," JD says. "I didn't pay for my tuition relying _solely_ on scholarships." He leans in close and grins conspiratorially. "Personally, I think Chris prefers his team to have slightly shady backgrounds."

Ezra doesn't comment, but by the time JD makes his report to Chris, Ezra's consolidated most of his off-shore holdings into a single, squeaky-clean account in Ireland and is busy filing out the paperwork to register an international holding corporation in his own name.

 

 **4.** Ezra is used to getting hurt on the job – it's the one thing that didn't change when he switched which side of the law he was on. Being a conman means taking risks, usually because the most valuable targets are also the ones who tend to be surrounded by serious men sporting serious guns (or, on one memorable occasion, a 17th century samurai sword). Just because he cons for the good guys now doesn't remove that risk, and he knows exactly what is going to happen to him with Nick Falco learns that he's been played. 

It takes his team five very long and painful minutes to burst through the compound's doors (and Ezra has to give Nick some credit for style; he's never had his kidneys bruised in a mansion with imported Italian marble floors before) and he is honestly a little bit shocked that the first thing Josiah and Buck do is take the two goons down before they even think to check if Nick Falco's still in the room. 

(The fact that Falco's bolted does not surprise Ezra in the least. The fact that at least half of his team seem more concerned about his wounds than the fact that a truly bad man has slipped out of their hands and five months of very hard work have just gone down the tube, does.)

He's also not terribly surprised to look up during Nathan's surprisingly gentle ministrations to see Chris stalking towards him. He is surprised, however, when the first thing Chris says is, "If you knew there was a chance your cover was gonna be blown, you shoulda told me. I could've gotten Vin into place to cover your ass." 

Ezra doesn't shrug, because shrugging would make his cracked rib do something painful and nasty to his body, but he does manage to convey his cool aplomb with a raised eyebrow (the one that isn't split) and a version of his usual smirk. "It was a calculated risk."

"Yeah? Well next time, you run your calculations past me and _I_ decide if it's worth the risk," Chris snarls before he turns and walks away. Ezra watches him go, then grunts in pain as Nathan pulls a suture tight.

"You know he's mad 'cause you risked your life, right?" Nathan says. 

"And I'm sure losing Falco has no impact on his feelings whatsoever."

"Ezra, if you think Chris gets this mad just 'cause we temporarily lost our bad guy, then you ain't nearly as smart as Chris told us you was," Nathan says as he begins to wrap Ezra's chest. He shakes his head and adds, "And I was hoping at least one of y'all wouldn't run head first into danger." 

 

 **5.** Ezra has always been able to talk his way into or out of trouble. Always. 

(Maude swears that his first words were "didn't do it!" but Maude has always been fonder of a good story than the truth.) 

So the fact that he can't find what words to say that'll get him out of the shithouse with Chris is…troubling, to say the least. 

What's more troubling is that he's not sure why he's in trouble. They've arrested Falco, they've found most of his guns, Ezra's gotten JD to do a once over of _all_ of his financials (even the ones belonging to those aliases that _might_ skirt over the line into completely illegal) and he's sure there won't be another slip-up like Falco again. Plus he's even gotten acclimated to the whole dirt and mud thing Chris has going on at his ranch. Hell, he's even participated in a few of the "football" games without any prodding or threatening! So he really can't understand why Chris is suddenly in such a mood around him. 

So he does what he always does when presented with a hard target he has to con: he starts conducting research. Which is why he's at some terrible hole-in-the-wall barbeque place watching Vin polish off an entire rack of ribs in something that might be equal parts awe and horror. 

"Have I done something to offend our illustrious leader," he asks Vin in a momentary pause. 

"Chris?" Vin snorts, which Ezra now knows means he's laughing. "Hell, everything tends to piss off Chris." 

"So I'd observed," Ezra said, poking at his collard greens. "But while I might not know him as well as, perhaps, the rest of you do, I can still tell when a man is angry with me." 

"Betcha got lots of practice with that," Vin says. He wipes his hands clean then tilts his head to one side. "I reckon you wanna know what the problem is, you should just ask him."

"But—" Ezra begins to say, because that's not the way things work in his world – in any of his worlds. You don't ever just ask a person out right what they want; you sidle around the question, you soft play it, you wait until you have all the answers before you ever ask anything. 

"Just ask," Vin says, as he puts on his ridiculous hat (seriously, who wears a cowboy hat these days?) and smirks. "Answer might surprise ya. And thanks for lunch." 

"But!" Ezra says again, but by that point, Vin's already slouched his way out of the restaurant and is leaning against Ezra's car, idly picking at his teeth with a toothpick, and the waiter is rather politely but insistently presenting the bill. 

 

 **6.** For all that Ezra was a conman first, and an FBI agent second, and an ATF agent now, he's never really learned how to be part of a team. Oh he knows the mechanics of teamwork, of course, but it's the other stuff that leaves him baffled. 

(He suspects Maude is the root of his trouble. Of course, he suspects Maude is the root of many of his troubles.)

He knows, for example, that Vin still wears his dog tags, even though it's been years since his discharge from the army; that Nathan would have been a doctor if he hadn't found fighting bad guys so rewarding; that for all Josiah's talk of alternate religions he still occasionally forgets and crosses himself when he thinks they really need God's helping hand; that Buck, for all his leers and gestures, has a streak of old fashioned chivalry a mile wide; that JD will never get around to asking Casey to marry him if someone doesn't give him a good kick in the pants; and that part of Chris's trauma surrounding the death of his family was that Sarah was pregnant with their second child. 

He knows all these things, but they're just…facts to him. Bits of information that can be used as leverage at some point, should the need arise. Knowing these things doesn't make him a part of this team, doesn't integrate him into their lives in any way other than a co-worker; he knew similar things about his team back in Atlanta. They'd been useless there, too. 

The fact that he participates in the office pool on how many Twinkies Vin can stuff into his mouth in five minutes, or plays in their weekly poker night (he cheats, of course), or that he now has an official mug at Chris's ranch…that's still doesn't mean he's part of a team. 

(This in no way diminishes his aching desire to _be_ a part of this team, because as crazy as they are, he's starting to get their crazy, starting to like it. Starting to wish he could belong to it.)

When Chris summons him into his office at the end of the workday exactly six months since he first signed on, Ezra's relatively certain he's going to be canned. He may be the best undercover operative currently not working for the CIA (he does have _some_ standards) but just like he knows everything else, he knows that Chris would rather take someone who fit into his team over someone who was technically the best. And while he understands that, understands the reason, there's a part of him that's hoping that for once Chris will make an exception, that he'll take competence over fitting in. 

Ezra takes his time sitting down before Chris's desk, using his known fussiness about his clothes as an opportunity to observe, to scan the top of Chris's desk – covered in paperwork for the most part, but there's a brown personnel folder on top – to look for the inevitable signs that he's going to be asked to leave. But he has to sit down eventually, and when he does he has to struggle for the cool, calm, aloof expression he wishes to wear. 

The way Chris is staring at him, Ezra suspects he's not pulling it off quite as well as he could wish. 

"Well," Chris says at last, and Ezra quirks an eyebrow at him (the one that still has three neat little stitches in it, unfortunately, and he can't quite suppress his tiny grimace of pain). 

"Well what?" Ezra says. 

"Six months," Chris says, and he taps the personnel folder. "We agreed you'd have a six month trial."

"And today is the last day of that trial," Ezra agrees, proud of the way he keeps his voice mild despite the dull edge of panic that's making his heart beat faster. 

"So? Are you staying?" 

Ezra doesn't quite gape – gaping would be so unprofessional after all – but he can't quite mask the small jerk of surprise that comes at Chris's words. 

"You're…not firing me?" he says at last. 

"You know how much paperwork I had to do to get you in the first place?" Chris says, but Ezra can sort of read him now, can see that Chris's gruffness is just a bluff to hide his genuine desire to keep Ezra here, to keep Ezra on his team. 

"I—" Ezra begins to say, a prelude to confessing that he thinks this is where he's meant to be, among these slightly tarnished men, then changes his mind. "Yes," he says. "Yes. I do believe I'll stay."

"Good," Chris says, and he stands up and grabs his coat. "Come on over to The Saloon." He grins, sharp and slightly evil. "New guy buys the first round." 

 

 **7.** Ezra Standish has fourteen passports, only one of which bears his actual name. (He keeps the bulk of them because why burn an alias when you don't have to, but he doesn't entertain quite so many fantasies about becoming one of the other thirteen men.)

He owns a closet full of beautiful clothes that he adores and a dresser he's slowly filling with Levi jeans and plain cotton shirts (he still refuses to wear flannel, and he'll die before he puts on plaid) and clothes purchased with durability and ease of washing in mind rather than for style or luxury. 

He still squirrels away most of his money, or converts it into small, portable goods that can be easily liquidated, because the danger that he might have to run someday is still there. But he's told JD where to find his other assets – the ones he's hidden deep behind a complex web of shell companies and overseas subsidiaries – and how if they're depleted it means he's on the run and what JD should do next. 

(He gave Josiah, who has that trick of becoming a black hole for words when he decides to listen to a man, a much more detailed run down of the people who might be gunning for him, and about his contingency plans for the ten most likely scenarios surrounding his sudden disappearance, about three months after his probationary period actually lapsed, in the quiet comfort of Chris's kitchen, and over a bottle of some really good bourbon. He's not entirely sure Josiah remembers all of what he said, because they were both incredibly drunk, but he's written everything out, just in case.) 

He still bets in the office pool. He still cheats at cards. He's still more than a little horrified by Vin's eating habits. 

He still gets injured on missions (that's just something that will never change, no matter how much Nathan grumbles). 

He's still Maude Standish's darling boy. 

He's still going to stay.


End file.
